In recent years, telecommunication devices have advanced from offering simple voice calling services within wireless networks to providing users with many new features. Telecommunication devices now provide messaging services such as email, text messaging, and instant messaging; data services such as Internet browsing; media services such as storing and playing a library of favorite songs; location services; and many others. In addition to the new features provided by the telecommunication devices, users of such telecommunication devices have greatly increased. Such increase in users is only expected to continue and in fact, it is expected that there could be a growth rate of twenty times more users in the next few years alone. Such an increase in wireless traffic has no place to go and thus, the performance of wireless networks will suffer.
It has been determined that a big difference in performance of wireless networks can be achieved by moving users closer to base stations that handle the traffic within the wireless networks. Generally, the base stations control telecommunication device traffic within a macro cell. Those macro cells usually include a single base station. The closer a user is to the base station, the more efficient the service provided to the user. For example, a user close to the edge of the macro cell may achieve only five megabits (Mb) per second of performance with a telecommunication device, while a user closer to the base station may achieve a 50 Mb per second performance with a telecommunication device.
To help address such performance issues within wireless networks, heterogeneous networks have been created. In such heterogeneous networks, the macro cells are divided into smaller cells generally referred to as pico cells. Each macro cell is still controlled by a high power node or base station, while the pico cells are controlled by lower power nodes or access points. The access points control traffic of telecommunication devices within their corresponding pico cells. The access points communicate with the base stations via a wired connection, for example, fiber optics, hard wired technology, etc. However, the telecommunication devices still communicate with the access points over a standard, licensed frequency or spectrum and thus, the continued growth and increase in traffic will cause more interference and thus, quality of service will continue to suffer.